This paper provides a critical analysis of post-humanitarianism with reference to adaptive
design. At a time when precarity has become a global phenomenon, the design principle has
sidelined the need for, or even the possibility of, political change. Rather than working to
eliminate precarity, post-humanitarianism is implicated in its reproduction and governance.
Central here is a historic change in how the human condition is understood. The rational
Homo economicus of modernism has been replaced by progressive
neoliberalism’s cognitively challenged and necessarily ignorant Homo
inscius. Solidarity with the vulnerable has given way to conditional empathy. Rather
than structural outcomes to be protected against, not only are humanitarian crises now seen as
unavoidable, they have become positively developmental. Post-humanitarianism no longer provides
material assistance – its aim is to change the behaviour of the precariat in order to
optimise its social reproduction. Together with the construction of logistical mega-corridors,
this process is part of late-capitalism’s incorporation of the vast informal economies
of the global South. Building on progressive neoliberalism’s antipathy towards formal
structures and professional standards, through a combination of behavioural economics,
cognitive manipulation and smart technology, post-humanitarianism is actively involved in the
elimination of the very power to resist.

Introduction

Drawing its energy from the wave of New Left and counter-cultural radicalism of the 1960s
(Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), an NGO-led direct
humanitarian action pushed onto the international stage during the 1970s. The radicalism of this
new anti-establishment sans frontières humanitarianism lay in its
political challenge to the conventions of Cold War sovereignty. By being there on the ground it
sought to hold sovereign power to account, witnessing its excesses while professing a
face-to-face humanitarian solidarity with its victims. For a couple of decades it was successful
in publicly challenging Western foreign policy in Africa, Latin America and Southeast Asia (Duffield, 2007: 51–4). Having once exercised a moral
leadership, however, after a long struggle against donor absorption and UN control, an
international direct humanitarian engagement finally yielded amid the horrors of Iraq and
Syria.

The War on Terror imposed limitations. Compared to the 1970s and 1980s, humanitarian agencies
found their political room for manoeuvre significantly restricted (BOND, 2003). At the same time, despite agency growth and extensive efforts to
professionalise relief work, there was little commensurate increase in effectiveness (Fiori et al., 2016). Growing risk aversion
and recourse to remote management, moreover, created problems of distancing and loss of
familiarity (Healy and Tiller, 2014). Distracted by
debt-fuelled uncertainty, rather than an indignant citizenry, Western publics now present as so
many disillusioned, ironic spectators (Chouliaraki,
2013). Diplomatic influence has also declined (Mair,
2013). While NGOs lay claim to a ‘non-governmental’ status, direct action
thrived when donor sovereignty was, paradoxically, still able to cast a shadow. Given the refugee
crisis, few can today contemplate the wretched state of ‘official’ humanitarianism
without some disquiet. Despite what we may wish or demand, however, it is unlikely that
significant improvement will occur any time soon. But to then conclude that humanitarianism is
dead would be a mistake.

While autonomous international direct action lies buried in the rubble of the West’s
urbicidal wars, a new and optimistic, less direct but technologically updated humanitarianism has
confidently stepped forth. More de-risked and requiring less professional expertise than the
labour-intensive direct engagement of the past, it is a cheaper Western humanitarianism designed
for connectivity rather than circulation. Often called humanitarian innovation (ALNAP, 2009; Betts and
Bloom, 2014), a feature of this new humanitarianism is its enthusiastic embrace of
adaptive design (Ramalingam et al.,
2014; HPG, 2018). Moreover, unlike autonomous
direct action, which reached its peak in the late 1980s, humanitarian innovation sits comfortably
with private partners and corporate sponsorship (Zyck and
Kent, 2014), a necessary recalibration given its dependence upon what can be called the
computational turn – that is, since the 1990s, the seamless penetration of commercial
information and communication technologies, software platforms, automating apps and screen
interfaces into all aspects of personal, social, national and international life tout
court. Humanitarian innovation is politically safe, logoed, glitzy and smart.

Besides establishment acceptance, humanitarian innovation draws positivity from its disavowal
of past failures and commitment to a future of ‘failing-forward in a spirit of
honesty’ (HPG, 2018: 132). Transparency
regarding current systemic ‘pathologies’ like institutionalising self-interest or
neglecting the agency of the disaster-affected (ibid.: 22–3) is part of
the self-cleansing necessary to birth a humanitarianism 2.0. This paper, however, questions
whether humanitarian innovation can be any more effective than the past relief efforts it now
disavows. Rather than system failure, just as important is that the world has changed. Societies
are more fragmented and unequal than before (Piketty,
2014). International space has striated into fast, slow and stopped lanes (Brown, 2010) as debt, precarity and anger have flourished
(Mishra, 2017). Rather than correcting past mistakes,
humanitarian innovation is embarked on a wholly different project. It is helping create the
systems and structures to govern global precarity. Important here is its privileging of the
design principle over the need for, or even the possibility of, political change.

Design Not Politics

The computational turn and societal dependence on digital technologies has changed the way the
world is understood and the status of humans within it (Chandler, 2018). The privileging of the design principle is central to this change.
Besides the spatial shift from circulation to connectivity, an ontological, epistemological and
methodological translation has also taken place (Duffield,
2018). While anticipating late-modernity, the spirit of 1970s direct humanitarian action
was fabricated from a deductive process of knowledge formation framed by narratives of history,
causation and reciprocity. Reflecting the rise to dominance of a cybernetic episteme, this
register has been replaced by a reliance on inductive mathematical data and machine-thinking for
sense-making (Rouvroy, 2012). Thinking has been
transformed into calculation (Han, 2013).1

The current dominance within the academy of empiricism and behaviourism reflects this change
in world-experience. What is often called post-humanism (Braidotti, 2013) brings several contemporary positivist stands together.
These include the new empiricism, speculative realism and actor network theory. Post-humanist
thought draws on process-oriented behavioural ontologies of becoming. These privilege
individuals understood as cognitively limited by their unmediated relationship with their
enfolding environments (Galloway, 2013; Chandler, 2015). An individual’s
‘world’ reduces to the immediate who, where and when of their changing network
connections and disconnections. The overlap here with neoliberalism’s necessarily
ignorant subject is returned to below. Importantly, the pure factuality of a post-humanist
existence casts doubts on the distinction between a lived reality and a wider world, a
distinction that is central to knowledge and the narrative of history. Without this separation
there is no space, as it were, for a political commons of contrasting life-chances, contestation
and critique that is essential if we are to successfully share the world with Others. In its
absence, as Bruno Latour approvingly argues, the whole becomes smaller than the sum of its parts
(Latour et al., 2012). Rather than a
shared world of circulation, we have the endless personalised and separate worlds of
connectivity.

Post-humanism problematises the possibility of a shared or collective politics. Indeed, Latour
(Latour, 2008) goes further in suggesting that design
has now replaced politics. Building on his earlier rejection of grand narratives and critique
(Latour, 2004), Latour claims that since encountering
the scale of the ecological crisis, we are all now designers rather than modernisers. Across a
wide arc of operational discourse, empathetic design attitudes reflecting such feminine
sentiments as ‘attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care’ have all
but replaced earlier, more masculine Promethean commitments to ‘emancipation, detachment,
modernization, progress and mastery’ (Latour,
2008: 2). In place of political change, Latour asserts the primacy of a conservative
design-based ontopolitics. That is, the need to accept and work with the world as is –
rather than how it ought to be. In celebrating the positive demand for empathy,
humility and resilience, adaptive design supplants the call for systemic change. This
conservatism is an example of how a progressive neoliberalism (Fraser, 2017) is dissolving and sapping the powers of resistance (Han, 2010). The excessive positivity of adaptive design,
its endless willingness to happily fail-forward into the future, suits the economic logic of
late-capitalism.2 To draw this out, it is
necessary to first review the latter’s greatest achievement.

Global Precarity

A characteristic of late-modernity, at least in relation to the global North,3 is what Nikolas Rose has called the ‘death
of the social’ (Rose, 1996). This demise is
usually equated with the roll-back of the welfare state. Originally meant as a collective
insurance-based shield against market forces, since the 1980s the welfare state has been
residualised through means-testing, privatisation, cuts and the politics of austerity. Companies
and businesses, however, have also shed their former social-democratic responsibilities (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Jobs for life,
intergenerational career structures, apprenticeships, subsidised canteens, social clubs, sports
facilities and company pensions have disappeared. In the mid twentieth century, for the white
working class at least, welfarism together with a Fordist employment culture provided a high
degree of protection against market forces. Indeed, this was a defining political feature of the
West’s racial- and gender-inflected Cold War social-democratic settlement (Streeck, 2017). Over the last two or three decades, driven
by the neoliberalism of the conservative counter-revolution, this social protection has largely
evaporated.

Insurance- and company-based social protection has historically been limited or absent in the
global South. Late-modern precarity begins here first (Munck, 2013). Encouraged by the imposition of structural adjustment, the South’s
informal economies began to rapidly expand from the end the 1970s, absorbing the surplus
population thrown off as public-sector employment and services contracted (Cornia, 1987). Moving to catch up, so to speak, by the 1990s a
‘post-social’ economy was consolidating in the global North. While marked
differences remain, the North and South have drawn together around the economic logic of
precarity. In the latter, fuelled by jobless growth, for several decades a self-reproducing
informal sector has been by far the largest employer and supplier of goods and services (Meagher, 2016). For the North, precarity has taken the form
of the disappearance of ‘good’ jobs as the casualisation of work has increased.
This includes the growth of insecure, poorly paid temporary work and marginal forms of
self-employment (TUC, 2017). Wages have stagnated,
and social mobility stalled. Moreover, it is widely accepted that today’s young no longer
enjoy the life chances of their parents (Corlett,
2017). Given this downturn, living the dream has meant a massive expansion of debt
financing (Streeck, 2017).

The acceleration of economic informality in the global South has been matched by the
residualisation of market protection in the North. As this conjuncture suggests, the greatest
achievement of late-capitalism has been to author an expanding post-social
global precariat. While progressive neoliberalism celebrates the exchange of
‘nanny-state’ security for a contingent freedom to consume (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005), late-capitalism is fraught with
contradictions. Reversing a hitherto world-historical trend, since the ‘long boom’
ended in the 1970s there has been a secular decline in the rate of profit. Every recovery from
the periodic business cycle has, from this period, been feebler than the last (Brenner, 2006). Recovery from the 2008 financial crisis,
for example, has been the weakest and most prolonged on record (Streeck, 2017). Reflecting the realities of the downturn, the new freedom
to consume has, to a remarkable degree, been unequally distributed (OECD, 2008; Oxfam, 2016).

Precarity is a by-product of the long downturn. It emerges at that historic moment when the
economy becomes a site of permanent emergency (Streeck,
2011). A human surplus coexists with the ‘jobless’ growth resulting from
the systemic urge to deepen automation at a time of declining profitability (Smith, 2017). Within a post-social world, risk and security
have been individuated. Compared to the normative welfare systems of the past, a new
disaggregated and personalised biopolitics has emerged. If biopolitical regimes could be likened
to animal species, the welfare state catered for the herd. Today, it is the turn of the
predator.4 Rather than share
risk, there is a new emphasis on individual responsibility. In the global North, the downturn
has spawned a narcissistic culture of bodily fitness, healthy lifestyles and making good
choices, while in the South, a post-humanitarian ethic has disaggregated, medicalised and
reduced precarity to the basic nutritional, energy, health, sanitation, education, financial and
psychic requirements needed to maintain bodily functioning (Jaspars, 2015). Everywhere, resilience, or the injunction to endlessly adapt before
unmediated market and environmental forces, has become the zeitgeist of late-modernity (Evans and Reid, 2014).

As the uncertainty of active unemployment becomes the global work norm, the chronically poor
and the disaster-affected have blurred. In an unmediated relationship with their environments,
they are both subject to permanent emergency. They constantly change place and, at a time when
economy and disaster have blurred, from a post-humanitarian perspective, they become
indistinguishable. Since resilience is now equally required of the poor and exposed – as
well as the ‘first responders’ – the traditional distinction between
developmental and humanitarian relief has also lost its meaning. Disasters are developmental; so
development has been set the task of re-wilding a post-social world. Within the economic logic
of precarity, however, the global South has a special place. Able to utilise the relatively
unregulated conditions existing there (Hosein and Nyst,
2013), rather than eradicating poverty, the role of humanitarian innovation is to
experiment, trial and anticipate the means to govern an emerging global precariat (Jacobsen, 2015). In particular, the challenge is to sustain
precarity in the sub-prime conditions of the South by optimising its social reproduction. Having
devoured, since the 1970s, the last areas of economic and institutional autonomy still outside
of itself (Sloterdijk, 2013), other than profitably
recycle the precarity it now produces in abundance, so to speak, late-capitalism has no other
future.

Incorporating the Wired Slum

For decades, the global South’s huge informal economies have dwarfed conventional
economic activity (Dunaway, 2014). Enabled by
connectivity, the long downturn has encouraged late-capitalism to move beyond the South’s
enclaves and the special economic zones established during the 1980s as part of the
North’s deindustrialisation (Amsden, 1990).
Private finance is investing in what are called infrastructural ‘mega-corridors’
(Hildyard and Sol, 2017). With China’s Belt
and Road Initiative just one example, this is a huge near-global expansion. Except Antarctica,
no region is excluded with continental – even transcontinental – infrastructure
plans in existence that seek to reappropriate the biosphere through a vast global infrastructure
of smart logistical corridors. Securitised archipelagos of interconnected special zones, fast
interconnectors and smart terminals are expanding across and between the global North and South.
Hundreds of millions will be affected as they are cleared to make way for the new roads, ports,
trains and airports, or else ‘transformed into pools of cheap labour for the mines,
plantations and factories that the corridors will service’ (ibid.:
7).

In a connected world, free circulation declines as the security architectures of containment
expand. On the ground, connectivity can be measured in terms of the global explosion of fences,
barriers and check-points (Brown, 2010). Logistical
mega-corridors are extra-legal boundary mechanisms that, working across multiple jurisdictions,
both spatially separate and integrate the smart city and the wired slum, so to speak. They are
spaces where the international mobility differential of commercial actors can be used to exploit
the immobility and entanglement of a connected precariat. As sites of active unemployment, the
focus of this paper is late-capitalism’s absorption and reproduction of the informal
economies of the global South, especially the role of post-humanitarianism in governing global
precarity. The question of social reproduction is important here.

Encompassing the reproduction of human beings as a biological species, social reproduction is
an organic part of capitalism. It includes birthing and caring for the young, sick and old while
maintaining family, friendship and wider community linkages, identities and moralities (Fraser, 2016). Traditionally unpaid and cast as
women’s work, although men have always done some, without these taken-for-granted but
vital functions capitalism would not exist. Within the post-social world of late-capitalism,
social reproduction is in crisis.

During the 1960s and 1970s, dependency theorists argued that in the South, capitalism gained
from being able to drain what was then an autonomous, and largely rural, subsistence economy
(Wolpe, 1972). Still mainly outside the sphere of
capitalist production, this household-based economy kept wages low by freely absorbing most of
the costs of social reproduction. At the same time, through subsistence farming, the household
was able to subsidise those working in the wage economy (Laclau, 1971). At the moment of the dependency theorists’ discovery, however, an
autonomous, subsistence-based household economy was already in a state of dissolution (Duffield, 1981). Helped by the NGO-led aid invasion of the
1980s, and accelerated by the computational turn, late-capitalism has now absorbed what is now
better understood as the vast, expanding informal economies of the global South (Duffield, 2018).

The spread of mobile telephony and broadband has created new ways of knowing, incorporating
and acting upon the precariat (UNGP, 2009). Through
the electronic traces created and assiduously recorded by digital technologies, data informatics
makes visible what was previously denied to conventional accounting. Namely, the transactions,
affordances and networks that maintain the social reproduction of the precariat under conditions
of permanent emergency (UNGP, 2013). The
incorporation of the wired slum has allowed late-capitalism to open up, absorb and more
effectively drain the household production underpinning precarity. This has seen a significant
freeing-up of women’s labour and narrowing the gender gap in global labour force
participation. Women now constitute the majority of informal income earners over most of the
global South (Dunaway, 2014; Lebaron and Ayers, 2013).

In the past, informality was problematised because of its systemic tax avoidance and the
flouting of commercial regulations (Meagher, 1990).
The traditional aim of development policy was to regularise informality. That is, to graduate
the millions of workers, artisans, traders and enterprises that constitutes the informal sector
into a rule-based economy. Such graduation, however, is no longer the aim; even
though – through data informatics – the informal sector is mapped as never before.
In a post-social world, late-capitalism has no intention of again assuming responsibility for
social reproduction. To the contrary, the logic of the downturn is to externalise and preserve
the household’s subsidy to a declining rate of profit. With fewer opportunities for men
in the commodity chains that constitute the emerging global gig economy, so to speak, women are
increasingly unlikely to withdraw from the labour force during their child-rearing years (Dunaway, 2014). As the unequal distribution of chronic
ill-health, under-nutrition and morbidity attest (WHO,
2017), the social costs of this hyper-exploitation have been transferred with deleterious
effects to a contained and largely urban precariat.

Reflecting the parasitism of the downturn, rather than problematise informality,
developmentalists now praise it as an authentic and valued expression of community mutuality and
gender inclusion (Becker, 2004). Through such
progressive reinscription, the informal sector has been repackaged through projects like
‘Bottom of the Pyramid’ economics (Prahalad,
2006) or ‘inclusive capitalism’ as an eligible and eager development and
business partner. Consider, for example, UNDP’s
(2008) homely appraisal of NGO-assisted informality as a low-cost welfare infrastructure
for an inclusive capitalism. It points out that where poverty prevails, formal rules and
regulations are often less effective than informal arrangements. Moreover, inclusive business
models can work with these shadow arrangements. Importantly, they can free-ride on existing
community mutuality, such as local resource sharing and informal credit. External businesses, we
are told, ‘can count on these communal processes to fill gaps in the markets of the
poor’ (UNDP, 2008: 9).

While precarity has been absorbed, the costs of its social reproduction have been
externalised. Rather like the security guard that must supply his own dog, these costs have to
be met by the precariat itself. Under the rubric of humanitarian innovation,
post-humanitarianism is primarily concerned with optimising the behaviour of the precariat to
improve survival in a post-social wild. Women and their reproductive role are especially
important targets. Post-humanitarianism is an example of a now dominant ontopolitics (Chandler, 2018) – in accepting the unacceptable, we
are now all enrolled in the celebratory design task of making the most of the world as it is,
rather than how it ought to be.

Celebrating Ignorance

Although the rise of behaviourism within the academy predates the computational turn, it has
been enhanced through this development (Rouvroy,
2012). Optimising individual behaviour and experience lies at the cybernetic heart of
late-capitalism. Employing armies of practitioners, it embraces everything from moulding
consumer preference and influencing voter behaviour to shaping the choices and experience of
disaster-affected groups (HPG, 2018). The privileging
of behaviourism over more conceptual approaches to understanding (Anderson, 2007) is reflected in the growing influence of ‘behavioural
economics’ (Alcock, 2016). Before its sobering
escape into the wild, as evinced in the Trump election and Brexit referendum (Cadwalladr, 2017), behavioural economics had been
popularised as ‘nudge politics’. Despite raising democratic concerns in targeting
the sub-conscious, it has found favour among many Western governments.5

Behavioural economics operationalises late-capitalism’s logistical requirement for
people and things to be in the right place at the right time 24/7 (Srnicek, 2016). Humanitarian innovation embodies this cybernetic goal.
Optimising precariat behaviour to strengthen decision-making, improve health, employment,
life-style choices and, importantly, motherhood and child-rearing practices, is central to the
post-social humanitarian regime currently in formation (World Bank, 2015). Humanitarian innovation, moreover, not only targets the behaviour of
the precariat, reflecting late-capitalism’s antipathy to professional hierarchies; it
also seeks to change the attitudes and mindsets of humanitarian aid workers as well.

In justifying what, only a few decades ago, would have been called ‘brain
washing’, behavioural economics has required a significant shift in how the
actor-potential of the human subject is viewed. Throughout much of the twentieth century, this
understanding was shaped by the behavioural avatar of Homo economicus. While
Homo economicus could deceive and make one-sided decisions, it did make use of
deliberative reason and rationality. More recently, and especially since the 2008 financial
crisis, a new behavioural savant has appeared. Drawing on the neoliberalism of Friedrich Hayek
(Hayek, 1945), this now dominant exemplar brings into
question the usefulness, indeed, the possibility of human reason (World Bank, 2015; Cooper, 2011).
Central to Hayekian neoliberalism is the essentially post-humanist proposition that due to the
complexity of the surrounding world, apart from one’s immediate environment and networks,
humans are incapable of understanding society or the world as such.6 As Douglas Spencer has shown with regard to architectural
design, this state of necessary ignorance is ‘fundamental to neoliberalism’ (Spencer, 2016: 17).

Given the contrast with Homo economicus, this not-knowing, unperceptive and
necessarily ignorant behavioural avatar is here called Homo inscius.
Behavioural economics divides human consciousness into ‘reflective’ and
‘automatic’ functions. The former utilises reasoned deliberation to achieve
conscious goals. It is the latter, however, that is held more important in the shaping of
behaviour. Operating below the level of conscious reason, behaviour is primarily influenced by
the automatic play of unconscious heuristics, environmental cues, mental shortcuts and the
unthinking operation of group preferences and shared models (World Bank, 2015: 3–4). Given these individuated biases, there is a risk that
Homo inscius, if left on its own, will behave badly. Designing psycho-social
governance technologies acting at the level of the subconscious has proven irresistible to the
politically bankrupt elites presiding over the downturn. Because of Homo
inscius’ inability to fully comprehend, together with its inherent biases, the
compensatory appearance of the auto-correcting technologies and smart prosthetics of the
computational turn appear fortuitous, if not providential. The necessary ignorance of
Homo inscius is compensated by the signals and alerts that enfolding and
surveillant smart environments are designed to supply and record (Stiegler, 2016; Duffield,
2018).

Experiencing Precarity

The World Bank’s (2015) World Development
Report, Mind, Society, and Behaviour, is a major intervention bringing
precarity within the ambit of behavioural economics (Alcock,
2016). This initiative has been welcomed by developmentalists keen to draw parallels
between the Bank’s work and leading-edge initiatives among NGOs such as Doing
Development Differently7 and
Thinking and Working Politically8 (Ramalingam, 2014; Green, 2014). The Bank’s initiative is also praised
for spelling out that aid managers also have cognitive biases that can adversely affect the aid
experience. Consequently, these biases also need to be considered in project design. Typical of
many policy pronouncements following the 2008 global financial crisis, however, the World Bank
finds it necessary to reject the need for significant political change or social redistribution
(World Bank, 2015: 80). This is at a time when global
inequality is at record levels and new forms of post-social servitude and abjection are
appearing (Lebaron and Ayers, 2013). As a practical
illustration of the ontopolitics of design, for the World Bank, its rejection rests on the
alleged mental capacities of the chronically poor. Since the limitations of Homo
inscius are cognitive and environmental, it is argued that large-scale redistribution
would have limited effect (World Bank, 2015: 80).

As a way of grounding Homo inscius in the global South, Mind,
Society, and Behaviour redefines poverty in terms of ‘bandwidth’. This is
the sum of the enfolding personal, environmental and infrastructural resources and mental aids
– or lack of them – available to the chronically poor and exposed. While everyone
has cognitive biases, personal behaviour is influenced by one’s social milieu. An example
is given of a poor indebted farmer who, with the harvest still months away, is being pressed to
decide whether to make the long-term investment of sending a child to school. This is happening
when there is a hole in the roof, the kerosene has run out and finding clean water is a constant
effort. In addition, his neighbour is also expecting reciprocal help with medical bills because
the farmer’s family received similar support in the past. For behavioural economics,
poverty is an experience grounded in the constant grind of having to make hard choices: educate
a child, fix a roof or invest in communal reciprocity? Relentless hard choices ‘in effect
tax an individual’s bandwidth, or mental resources. This cognitive tax, in turn, can lead
to economic decisions that perpetuate poverty (ibid.: 81,
emphasis added).

As off-grid environments, slums typically lack regular water, electricity, sanitation and
other infrastructural services. This absence also increases the cognitive levy. A high mental
tax creates poor frames of thought and makes for impaired decision making. For the World Bank,
thinking has become a calculative zero-sum game. The more ‘bandwidth’ the poor
consume in their daily grind, the less they have for making important decisions. Presumably, the
greater the stress and privation, the more mindless Homo inscius becomes.9 It follows that reducing this cognitive tax leaves
more bandwidth for better decision making. And better decision making on the part of the poor
fortuitously negates the need for ‘a large-scale redistribution of resources’
(ibid.: 80).

Compared to the political solidarity that underpinned direct humanitarian action, Lilie Chouliaraki (2013) has argued that today’s
post-humanitarianism is grounded on empathy – including the ability of aid workers or the
public to understand and emotionally associate with the experiences of the disaster-affected.
This post-humanist privileging of the subconscious also changes how poverty and exposure to
disaster are perceived. Rather than demanding political change, vulnerability becomes a direct
or unmediated experience characteristic of the life-world of the person concerned. Just as
important as material aid, if not more so, is fast access to sympathetic value-added
information. With design having supplanted politics within the post-humanitarian canon, the
discursive field is bounded by the interplay between the empathy of the
onlooker or practitioner and the direct experience of the affected.10 The aim is no longer to control or contain
disasters – it’s more about improving how they are experienced.

Optimising Reproduction

The arrival of satellite sensing and data informatics enables the constant hard choices made
by the precariat to be visualised as behavioural patterns (Meier, 2015). Through the cybernetic feedback loops of adaptive design, behavioural
economics seeks to reverse engineer, if you will, the experience of poverty. The aim is to
increase the mental bandwidth available to the precariat by optimising behaviour. This includes
the timely and iterative delivery of context-specific, value-added information together with the
deployment of smart humanitarian objects and technologies that compensate slum-dwellers for the
absence of an infrastructural fixed grid.

Behavioural economics is premised upon the constant tailoring and readjustment of information
‘to fit the human body and its cognitive abilities’ (World Bank, 2015: 2). The feedback process of adaptive design has four
distinct stages: first, behaviour must be captured, stored and algorithmically analysed; second,
the returned information must be personalised to the individual or group in a way that resonates
emotionally; third, this value-added information should illuminate a way forward; and, finally,
there must be a clear moment when the individual can, through actions or choices, recalibrate
their behaviour. This recalibration is measured, ‘and the feedback loop can run once
more, every action stimulating new behaviours that inch us closer to our goals’ (Geotz, 2011). Resilience, with its emphasis on constant
adaptation, sits well with ideas of feedback and design.

Social reproduction can be optimised by changing behaviour relating to household savings,
energy consumption, educational priorities, mental and physical productivity and maternal and
child health (World Bank, 2015: 2). Taken together,
these factors are important for the reproduction of the cheap, territorially immobile, low-level
sensorimotor skills (Joshi, 2017) that drive the vast
informal economies of the global South. Mind, Society, and Behaviour emphasises
in several places that cognitive techniques cost relatively little, need not be complex and are
already widely practised in the private sector. Rather than requiring radical change to existing
aid programming, it is largely a question of ‘nuances of design and
implementation’ (ibid.: 3). Taking ‘the cognitive taxes of
poverty into account’ (ibid.: 81) might simply involve changing the
timing of cash transfers, altering the labelling on foodstuffs, simplifying processes or service
take up, sending out regular reminders, marketing new social norms or ‘reducing salience
of stigmatised identities’ (ibid.: 3). The cognitive tax on the
precariat could be reduced by shifting the timing of critical decision-making regarding, for
example, education, health or employment ‘away from periods when cognitive capacity and
energy (bandwidth) are predictably low’. At the same time, assistance can be targeted
‘to decisions that may require a lot of bandwidth’ (ibid.: 81).
For the Bank, not only is large-scale redistribution unnecessary, improving the experience of
precarity also costs little and creates minimal organisational demands.

Another important aspect of cognitive streamlining and experience improvement concerns
critical infrastructure. In a gesture of transparency, humanitarian innovation accepts that
after sixty years of terrestrial development, a billion or more people still lack access to
piped water, stable electricity, proper waste disposal, adequate housing, comprehensive
schooling, professional health care and regular financial services. Levelling up or
reconstructing a fixed grid, however, hasn’t been a serious international objective since
the onset of the downturn. The logistical mega-corridors that are being built sidestep the
crisis of urban renewal. This aversion has deepened with the growing infrastructural gap,
accumulating disrepair and damage caused by natural disasters and wars, the massive urbicidal
destruction unleashed in the Middle East and the ongoing dispossessions resulting from the
expanding mega-corridors themselves.

For the World Bank, the crisis of urban renewal negatively impacts precariat bandwidth. Having
to daily exert a great deal of mental energy just to access such basic necessities as food and
clean water means the precariat ‘are left with less energy for careful deliberation than
those, simply by virtue of living in an area with good infrastructure and good
institutions’ (ibid.: 13). Thus, the absence of a universal fixed grid
‘like piped water, organised child care, and direct deposit and debit [accounts for]
earnings – encumber those living in low income setting with a number of day-to-day
decisions that deplete mental resources even further’ (ibid.: 81). Since
the mid 2000s, reflecting the call for an inclusive capitalism, the increasing corporatisation
of poverty has been evident (Schwittay, 2011). One
register of this has been the rapid growth of commodities, objects and financial products
specifically designed for the precariat (Cross and Street,
2009). With behavioural economics providing a cognitive justification, the goal of
humanitarian innovation is to normalise the application of private sector business models and
smart technology to chronic poverty and disaster vulnerability (Betts and Bloom, 2014: 5).

Technoscience is developing a series of add-ons to address the crisis of urban renewal. Unlike
the levelling-up effects of a universal fixed grid, however, smart technology is different
– it levels downwards (Duffield, 2016). It
folds into the fabric of society, adapting and adjusting itself to the inequalities encountered,
and the differences of speed and bandwidth found. Smart technology adapts itself to the social
milieus within which it operates (Zuckerberg, 2014).
Throughout the global South, there is an expanding suite of smart humanitarian objects and
technologies providing a range of services that support the social reproduction of the precariat
by substituting for an absent fixed-grid (Jacobsen,
2015). Together with cash-transfer programmes (Lavinas, 2013), this includes biometric registration and experimentation with
block-chain authentication as a means of managing aid and work entitlements (Dodgson and Genc, 2017). Solar power lighting and charging
solutions are widely marketed together with portable ceramic water filtration systems (Redfield, 2015). Replacing a need for medically-staffed
feeding centres, take-away mother-administered therapeutic foods to tackle malnutrition are now
common (Scott-Smith, 2013). Making good the paucity
of health and educational services, e-medicine and e-learning smart phone apps are being widely
trialled.

While these are only a few of the many objects and services available, a common feature is an
emphasis on self-administration, personalisation and portability. Rather than invoke the
community solidarity that underpinned earlier forms of participant development, these smart
technologies now call forth dependent communities of users permanently enrolled
in prototyping the technologies that govern them (Duffield,
2018).

Eliminating Professionals

From the outset, the aim of cybernetics was to exclude human beliefs, motivations and
intentions from the development of the human–machine interface (Halpern, 2014). Now a defining feature of late-modernity, this exclusion
shaped early computer programming. Politically, it found a reflection in the counter-cultural
anticipation of artificial intelligence as a means of undermining the professional hierarchies
of modernism. Computers would, it was argued, allow the design capabilities and expertise of
professionals to be transferred to the popular masses (Turner, 2006).

In the mid 1970s, the architect Nicholas Negroponte11 sought to eliminate professional privilege by facilitating public
participation and ownership of the architectural design process through computer programming.
The intention was to create ‘soft architectural machines’ that could translate
human imperfections, anxieties and emotions into the rich architectural designs of a ‘new
“redesigned” design process’ (Negroponte, 2003: 359). Defining Negroponte’s approach to programming was a
constructivist conception of learning by doing – the analogy being how a child is said to
learn. Not so much through formal teaching ‘but by interacting with the world, by having
certain results as a consequence of being able to ask for something, or being able to stand up
and reach it’ (Negroponte, 2006: 1-53)
– that is, through endless feedback loops of iterative environmental interaction
involving an automatic and continuous process of reaching out, discovery and recalibration. Such
constructivist assumptions regarding human learning have long operated as place-holders for the
arrival of machine-thinking.12

Running parallel with early computer programming, by the 1980s constructivism was also
appearing in the form of progressive pro-poor international development. Michael Edwards (1987), for example, in his celebrated piece,
The Irrelevance of Development Studies, rehearses the late-modern antagonism
towards professional knowledge using the post-humanist premise that the ‘real
world’ is defined by its empirical diversity and complexity. And hence, echoing Hayekian
neoliberalism, largely beyond human comprehension. Development problems are specific to a given
time and place. Indigenous livelihood and coping systems have evolved over centuries through
discrete, complex interactions between people and their ‘hostile environmental
conditions’ (Edwards, 1987: 120). Rather than
trying to transfer knowledge through explanation, demonstration and reason, like
Negroponte’s child, authentic learning is the organic product of trial and error on the
part of local communities. Development professionals short-circuit this natural process and
prevent people from thinking and acting for themselves. Anticipating the attention-deficit
Homo inscius, the role of progressive NGO-led participatory development was to
sensitively guide and empathetically allow for the constraints, imperfections, anxieties, fears
and emotions shaping the actions ‘of real, living people’ (ibid.:
121). Putting the last first, as it were, so they can reinvent their own more authentic
wheel.

Behavioural economics radically extends progressive neoliberalism’s antipathy towards
professional hierarchies from individual comportment to institutions themselves. Not only are
aid managers subject to cognitive bias and mindset limitations, the ability of organisations to
reform or improve is also now questioned. In separating itself from the failures of the past,
humanitarian innovation problematises the concerted attempts since the 1990s to professionalise
the aid system, especially the numerous moves to standardise humanitarian engagement through
behavioural codes, ground rules, technical guidelines and performance benchmarking (Fiori et al., 2016).

Reflecting late-capitalism’s disdain for independent standards and autonomous
expertise, side-lining humanitarian professionalism can be seen as a necessary condition for the
increasing involvement of the private sector (Meier,
2012). While aid managers may have more bandwidth than the precariat, for the World Bank (2015) their thinking is equally constrained by
established subconscious reflexes, mental models and heuristic devices. Such ‘deeply
ingrained mindsets’ (ibid.: 180) constrain decision making in many ways.
Besides the confirmation bias of favouring evidence that supports one’s views, they can
also limit the ability to empathise with the experience of the precariat. Importantly, when
faced with change and complexity, the ‘automatic’ mind reverts to rules,
standardisation and guidelines (ibid.: 180–2). Given the unthinking
recourse to such limiting heuristics among aid professionals, it is particularly important for
organisations to have mechanisms in place ‘to check and correct for their biases and
blind spots’ (ibid.: 183). Based upon the creation of iterative feedback
loops interconnecting aid mangers and the disaster-affected, adaptive design provides such a
mechanism.

For the World Bank, adaptive design involves front-loading problem diagnosis, building in
constant prototyping, tolerating failure and changing institutional incentives to counter
professional mental models and rule-based thinking (ibid.: 192–3). The
aim of adaptive design is to correct the cognitive biases of aid managers while, through
increasing bandwidth, encouraging the agency, auto-projectising and self-acting capacities of
the precariat. Important here is strengthening the empathy of managers while
improving the users’ experience of the system. The Humanitarian Policy
Group’s (HPG, 2018), A Design
Experiment: Imagining Alternative Humanitarian Action, is a comprehensive attempt to
envision such an exercise.

Liquefying Resistance

From an adaptive design perspective, rather than top-down one-size-fits-all interventions,
humanitarian agencies should constantly change organisational form according to the nature of
the emergency involved. This requires situating the design process within the lived experience
of all key actors. Apart from those directly affected by the disaster, this includes the
practitioners working within the system as well as those actors ancillary to it
(ibid.: 48). The aim is to identify the key ‘touch points’ that
offer the least resistance to reform. To illustrate the ideal process, HPG has constructed a
number of behavioural profiles which it calls ‘personas’. They are
‘fictitious characters who bring to life the needs, goals, values, drivers and behaviours
of larger groups of people’ (ibid.: 49). As with the humanitarian
objects mentioned above, rather than potentially autonomous self-acting communities, these
profiles suggest a recasting of the disaster-affected as so many surveilled communities of
bandwidth-users permanently enrolled in prototyping the means of their governance.

Possible aid manager mindset profiles include, for example, the ‘cautious
investigator’, the ‘defender of turf’, the ‘critical
thinker’, the ‘proceduralist’, the ‘constrained leader’ and
the ‘risk taker’. Among the disaster-affected one encounters the ‘change
agent’, the ‘embracer’, the ‘over-burdened’, the
‘reluctant’, the ‘self-reliant’, the ‘system-reliant’
and the ‘under-served’ (ibid.: 52–3). Each of these
profiles is given his/her appropriate aspirations, frustrations, and changes they would like to
see. A Design Experiment also includes the creation of post-humanist user
‘experience maps’ covering a dozen different emergency situations. Each one gives
an example of how such behavioural profiles could interact, while highlighting what is enabling
or disabling, or spoiling the user experience of the humanitarian system. Such profiles and maps
are argued to be useful as they allow ‘us to walk in users shoes by traveling [sic] with
them as they interact with a service/organisation/system’ (ibid.: 61).
These experience maps not only show a person’s touch points with the system, but
‘also their thoughts and feelings about that experience’ (ibid.).
Through incentives, actor alignment and sequencing, key touch points can be reimagined as design
sites for leveraging institutional adaptation and improving user experience.

Like the World Bank, HPG maintains that implementing such a programme does not require major
change to what already happens – it does not need ‘whole system, top-down
re-design’ (ibid.: 61). If the aim is for organisations to flexibly
adapt to the changing requirements of permanent emergency, such a top-down redesign would, in
any case, be a contradiction in terms. Instead, within A Design Experiment, we
can see something different. Building on progressive neoliberalism’s questioning of
professional hierarchies, organisational boundaries are also now dissolving and liquefying
(Bauman, 2000). Touch points, which vary according to
the nature of the emergency, the mindsets of managers and social milieu impacted, are transitory
portals that allow a penetration and reaching across organisational boundaries. They enable
mangers to improve their empathy while increasing the disaster-affected’s positive
experience of the aid system.

This interaction of behavioural profiles raises the question – if this design
experiment is to succeed, what type of manager or recipient behaviour is ideally preferred or
allowed? An examination of HPG’s actor profiles reveals an excess of positivity. While
many exhibit difficulties, constraints and fears, none present a fundamental or systemic
challenge. There is an assumption that, in opening to divergent cross-boundary interactions,
success is possible because reasonable people recognise some shared responsibility in making aid
better. While HPG’s profiles display various potentials, limitations and conflicts,
ultimately everyone involved – aid workers, donors and the disaster-affected –
share the same humanitarian goal of better ‘access to basic services, safety, and
opportunity, with the capacity to absorb shocks, and the agency to shape her/his future’
(HPG, 2018: 90). In other words, A Design
Experiment is thinkable because, in the last analysis, all actors think the same.

Paraphrasing Bruno Latour (2008), the profiles that
animate A Design Experiment tend to privilege compliant feminised design
sentiments such as attachment, precaution, entanglement, dependence and care. Absent are
troublesome masculine tropes like emancipation, detachment, modernization, progress and mastery.
From the start of the experiment, the negativity and recalcitrance that defines the real world
is excluded. Within HPG’s ‘experience maps’ you will find no angry Arab
refugees tearing down the razor-wire keeping them out of Europe. History’s awkward
customers are absent – no stone-throwing Palestinians, no Hutu refugees, no Darfuri
nomads. You will look in vain for the ground friction and anger shaping our present predicament
(Mishra, 2017). And without the negative, critique is
impossible.

Humanitarian innovation reflects progressive neoliberalism’s recoil from the negative.
Determined to disavow the alterity of the Other for the security of the Same, ‘our
society of positivity is steering clear of everything that offers resistance’ (Han, 2013: 33). Helped by the erosion of professional
hierarchies, organisational responsibilities and independent autonomy, under the conditions of
late-capitalism the power to resist is, itself, disappearing – that is, the negative
potency of being able to say no, to remain unknown, uncounted and forgotten. It is the power to
interrupt, to slow the flow, and create spaces where things can be stopped and discussed (Rouvroy, 2012). To gain entry to the mega-corridors of
spiralling feedback loops optimistically failing-forward to an uncertain future, humanitarian
innovation demands compliance, behavioural malleability and, not least, necessary ignorance.
Unfortunately for post-humanitarianism, however, it has little to offer in return –
other, that is, than timely value-added information such that the precariat can positively enjoy
the experience of its own abjection.

Notes

1

While important, current concerns over data privacy and the power of Silicon Valley are
secondary to these paradigmatic changes. Things like privacy can be addressed. Changes in the
way the world is understood, experienced and interrogated represent a greater political and
existential challenge.

The terms global North and South are used here figuratively. Loosely associated with
modernist distinctions between developed and underdeveloped countries, they no longer imply any
fixed geographical or social homogeneity. Their use, however, serves to retain the sense of
historic, political and economic divisions that continue to produce global power and distribute
life-chances unequally.

4

Crawford Holling’s often quoted article on ecological resilience is a critique of
equilibrium theory based upon research on predator/prey relations in the wild (Holling, 1973).

5

In 2010, for example, the UK government established a Behavioural Insights Team (also known
as the Nudge Unit). Since 2014, it has existed as a ‘social purpose company’ that
is partly owned by the Cabinet Office, its employees and the data-innovation charity Nesta.
See, http://www.behaviouralinsights.co.uk/

6

Except for limited pattern recognition, for Hayekian neoliberalism humans are held to be
incapable of understanding society due to its alleged complexity. Fortuitously, however, the
market compensates for human ignorance. The price mechanism functions like a computer and is
able to achieve optimal resource allocation through its powers of spontaneous
self-organisation.

Since the mid 2000s, there has been a growing number of computer games and software
programmes that claim to allow interested parties to experience what it is like to be a refugee
or subject to a disaster. The Darfur content on Google Layers, for example, was an early
attempt to encourage emotional understanding. Computer games produced in collaboration with
humanitarian agencies go further. They allow a player to ‘become’ a refugee. A
player would, for example, have to navigate the difficulties of fleeing a country, moving
through dangerous border regions and starting a new life in austere and unfriendly exile. The
game Against all Odds, produced by UNHCR in collaboration with Microsoft and
several media companies, is described as letting you ‘experience what it’s like
to be a refugee’ (UNHCR, 2005). The UN
Regional Information Centre for Western Europe (UNRIC) together with the mtvU student media
group at the University of Southern California, has produced Darfur is Dying.
This simulation allows players to negotiate the ‘forces that threaten the survival of
his or her refugee camp. It offers a faint glimpse of what it’s like for the more than
2.5 million who have been internally displaced by the crisis in Sudan’ (HRE, 2009).

11

Then head of MIT’s Architecture Machine Group that would become the Media Lab in
1985.

12

It is often said that children are more adept than adults at intuiting how computers work.
This is because they have been designed to make them child’s play, so to speak.

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Architecture, Building and Humanitarian Innovation

Journal Article

Publication History:

Humanitarian innovation has come under considerable fire in recent years for its
uncritical technophilia, its links with the private sector and its tendency to
fetishise objects rather than focusing on politics and process. There are many
examples of these issues in the shelter sector, yet this article argues that a
clear distinction should be made between innovation and architecture. By
comparing the Ikea-funded Better Shelter with the series of architectural
interventions in Vienna, collectively known as Places for
People, this paper argues that architecture can productively engage
with humanitarianism not by constructing shelters but by designing at a smaller
scale in a way that does not involve any building at all.

Journal Article

Publication History:

Language and its translation are important operational concerns in humanitarian
crisis response. Information sharing, coordination, collaboration and
relationship-building all revolve around the ability to communicate effectively.
However, doing so is hampered in many humanitarian crises by linguistic
differences and a lack of access to adequate translation. Various innovative
practices and products are being developed and deployed with the goal of
addressing these concerns. In this theoretical paper, we critically appraise the
ethical terrain of crisis translation and humanitarian innovation. We identify
ethical issues related to three broad themes. First, we foreground questions of
justice in access to translation and its prioritisation in contexts of
widespread and pressing needs. Second, we consider the relationship between
humanitarian ethics and the ethics of crisis translation. We argue for the
importance of attending to epistemic justice in humanitarian crisis response,
and consider how Ricoeur’s conception of linguistic hospitality provides
insights into how relationships in humanitarian settings can be understood
through the lens of an ethics of exchange while also acknowledging the steep
asymmetries that often exist in these contexts. Finally, we identify issues
related to how translation innovations intersect with humanitarian values and
humanitarians’ ethical commitments.

Digital Bodies, Data and Gifts

Journal Article

Publication History:

This is an initial exploration of an emergent type of humanitarian goods –
wearables for tracking and protecting the health, safety and nutrition of aid
recipients. Examining the constitutive process of ‘humanitarian
wearables’, the article reflects on the ambiguous position of digital
humanitarian goods developed at the interface of emergency response contexts,
the digitisation of beneficiary bodies and the rise of data and private-sector
involvement in humanitarian aid. The article offers a set of contextual
framings: first, it describes the proliferation and capabilities of various
tracking devices across societal domains; second, it gives a brief account of
the history of wristbands in refugee management and child nutrition; third, an
inventory is given of prototype products and their proposed uses in aid. It is
argued that what needs to be understood is that, in ‘the making’
of humanitarian wearables, the product is the data produced by digitised
beneficiary bodies, not the wearables themselves.

Four Decisive Challenges Confronting Humanitarian Innovation

Journal Article

Publication History:

When former Secretary General of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon encouraged the
humanitarian sector to innovate and create a new paradigm to respond to people
in crisis, the sector answered with an unbridled number of new enterprises and
laboratories to create tools, products and new initiatives. As these emerged, so
did the reality of the changing complexity of communities in need of
humanitarian assistance. The deterioration of the natural physical environment,
along with burgeoning population dynamics and threats to humanitarian workers
themselves, has tipped the balance of complexity beyond the capability of the
system to respond effectively. The humanitarian sector as a whole must urgently
commit to reconciling four critical challenges to reinvent itself and its
effectiveness: reconciling the meaning of innovation; developing an overarching
strategy that addresses the radically changing global context in which
communities require assistance; agreeing on an integrated structure to deliver
innovation; and addressing how innovation is financed. Unless the sector
addresses these four elements, the action and effect of innovation will fail to
realise the transformational change necessary, to respond to communities in
crisis now and in the future.